


Not At First Sight

by brutti_ma_buoni



Category: Elizabethan and Jacobean Theatre & Literature RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-17
Updated: 2015-12-17
Packaged: 2018-05-07 07:18:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,919
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5447969
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brutti_ma_buoni/pseuds/brutti_ma_buoni
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Will came to London to write and learn. He's doing that. Kit is distracting.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not At First Sight

**Author's Note:**

  * For [waspabi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/waspabi/gifts).



> Setting: London, c1995. Not everyone has a mobile phone. 
> 
> I *know*. 
> 
> It's terrifying.

“So,” Will says, heavily. “Mentoring.” He breathes into the clunky receiver, its weight a resented reminder of the limitations of this conversation. They have neither time nor privacy, neither intimacy nor proximity. But the voice on the line is essential all the same.

“Yes?” says Anne, cautiously. Anyone would think – anyone would think _correctly_ \- that she already knows what he will say next. Broadly. Generically. 

“I just-“ The words fail. He is usually such a fluent speaker, as much as a writer. He doesn’t only live on the page, but by his wits. If you’re a balding egghead at twenty-six, in an industry notorious for devouring youth, glamour and promise like so much low-grade sushi, you really have to have some social advantages or you might just as well run back to small town life and the girl (woman) you left behind. Will’s advantages are all words. It’s only in this regard that they fail him. It’s only in this regard that running home seems at all attractive. Anne is so much more real than his London life. And she would never-

“This is about Kit, isn’t it?” she says. Not for the first time, since he left home. There is a tone, a most distinct tone, of resignation. 

“Well,” he says, helplessly, because he can’t stop talking about it even in the face of such manifest uninterest. “I feel like a mentor shouldn’t be the bad influence in the relationship.”

She sighs. “True. Perhaps true. But much more amusing this way, surely?”

It’s true. As a comic device, it would be perfect. “But this isn’t a play. We’re not all actors, acting out our lives all the time.”

The distant voice turns wry. “Amazing. I thought you’d never get that.”

“How’s Suze?” he says, because he didn’t get to where he is today without recognising a cue. Even if promising actor-playwright-cum-ridiculously-young-husband-and-absent-father isn’t a role he feels wholly comfortable with. “And the twins?”

Anne tells him about teething troubles until the phonecard runs out, and Will tries not to think about the night ahead. 

*

They are standing on the roof of the National. Unfeasibly young, hideously fit, lads in baggy gear and beanies. You would think the clothes would get in the way of the sport. Perhaps they do. Perhaps he’s about to watch some of these young men fall to their death. He shivers.

“It’s unseasonably warm for February,” Kit points out, spotting his weakness. It’s a breath in Will’s ear, not meant for the boys. Too close, uncomfortable, and yet enticing. And there you have Marlowe encapsulated. What idiot could look at him and see a responsible chap ideal to help to mould the career of a journeyman writer like Will, he has yet to fathom. Or, rather, he knows damn well there’s a thread of patronage in the situation; Kit’s Cambridge first and Footlights sophistication placed sweetly next to Will’s successful local festival work. _Bring the lad on. Positive action, what?_ is probably how some discussion went behind the scenes of the National. As if Will’s nice middle-class upbringing is some ghastly impediment to success. (In the theatre, in fact, it is. If your childhood wasn’t gilded, it had better have been gritty beyond belief. But Will’s never wanted to write plays called, _Daddy, why did you do it?_. He wants some grandeur, and some distance from the everyday present. And some jokes.) To that extent, pairing him with Marlowe was perfect. No one else laughs at Will’s Pantheon puns the way Kit does. Which, possibly, is why no one else thinks his current work should be produced. But that’s a bleak thought for another day.

Meanwhile, Daz jumps over the side of the building, into what should be empty space. Apparently, he doesn’t plummet to his death. Kit shouts appreciatively as the others follow. “Parkour!”

He told Will that this was a wave of the future. Of energy and the reclamation of festering public space for the wild and free. Someday, he wants to write about it.

Well. Yes. They are impressive, Will allows. The evening isn’t yet so dark that he can’t follow their progress, swarming up and over the concrete jungle of south London like an army of unusually colourful rats. He just struggles to see them as meaningful, in the real world. How would one use them in a play? As chorus, perhaps, flowing across the set and over the protagonists’ problems, great and small. Above the world, like miniature gods of trivial powers. Yes, that might-

“Ahhhhh,” Kit interrupts, loud and content and oblivious. “Bankside!” 

Kit has a thing for London. This part in particular. His plays may be set in myth and far away, but his heart is here. It was almost the first thing that Will noticed about him, in that first dazzled week at the Development Schools. Kit defending London’s grime and the damp grey shades of the Festival Hall in a late September mizzle. The rough sleepers under Waterloo Bridge, the grim huddle of Hungerford footbridge clinging to the railway across the river. Someone else making the opposite case, the case for London as a suppurating hole of decay and terrorism. Someone else, name forgotten, who made it through the introductory week and no further, perhaps through Kit’s dislike of her. 

Kit’s been with the National since he left Cambridge. He has connections, and clout. Loving Bankside is no pose, and he can be savage with it. Will’s lodging in the Barbican is something he keeps very quiet, when Kit’s in a mood like this. Even a mile north of the river would be enough for a savaging if Kit felt so inclined. 

As they watch, the last daylight flees the skies. Darkness and the uncaring city swallow the free runners.

“You should try it, someday,” says Kit, to the dark emptiness where people were. The way he twice did about going to Brixton to buy coke, and (often) about various permutations of threesome, once about preaching atheism at Speaker's Corner on a Friday night, and (once) about punching a stranger on a bet.

“I don’t think so,” says Will. The way he always, always does. Will knows himself too well to make free with London. He is not Kit.

Kit rolls his eyes. “It’s not dangerous,” he lies. Kit always lies. Or perhaps he truly doesn’t see the danger, because he has done all those things, and come up smiling and invincible. Sometimes, Will tries to imagine living like that. As if tomorrow could be your last, but it doesn’t matter to you at all. As if nobody and nothing counts but your immortal reputation. As if kids’ shoes cost nothing, and wives are hobbles not beloveds (a pang, for his distant, oh-so-mature-and-independent beloved, who will never hear the details of tonight), and having a stable place to live, a family and a retirement fund are goals that only a desperate pleb could care about.

Kit’s mentoring is all about the wild side. Find your art, find your voice, leap unhesitatingly to your doom, laugh on the way down and call it a life well spent. 

Will wants to live into fat middle age. He dreams of gardening. Lately, he's been thinking about getting himself a financial adviser. Maybe not yet, but when he sells his first play, properly. The first time he gets performed in the West End, he’s going to work out where to invest that. Keep up the temp jobs and act where he must to keep the cashflow viable, and stack up the investments so that whatever success he has isn't a shooting star and a guttering end. 

He never, ever tells Kit this. He would feature, a bit-part and scathing, in one of Kit's satires. The man of full years at the start of his life, all his endings encompassed in his beginnings. Kit won't recognise himself in Will's work, because Kit thinks he is how the world is and should be. A full stop in full flight is how he will want to go. 

Increasingly, Will hopes he isn't beside Kit when it happens. 

*

It's an hour after the darkness fell that Will returns to his lodgings. He stopped off at the corner shop for a new phonecard, and he's tempted. It's a bad time to call, dinner for the kids, Anne frazzled and trying to do ten things at once. But he longs to hear her voice. He needs anchoring, sometimes, in his reality.

Kit had said, "I'm going to do it." Still looking out at the city, treating Will as audience. "I'm going to do everything. And I'll bring it back, and write something fucking _unbelievable_."

"I know you will," Will had responded, into a silence that lasted too long.

"You don't think it's the right thing to do." Kit hadn't sounded uncertain, not at all. Merely noting Will's dissent. 

Will had shrugged, looking at the view in turn, avoiding Kit's eyes, "I don't think it's the only way." He has books. He talks to people who have travelled. He loves to learn from others, reforming their originals into stories that sing for Will, and for the audience he knows is out there for his work. He doesn't need to be a soldier, a prince, a betrayed wife, a ghost, not to write them well. He can imagine them, breathe life into them, realistic or fantastical.

A train had crossed Hungerford Bridge, making for Charing Cross. Will followed it with his eyes, tuning out Kit. Imagining the trains under the river, making the same journey for the Northern line. A different world, yet the same trip. Funny, how there are such pronounced personalities to the lines. Overground and underground utterly different, but the cramped Piccadilly versus the lofty Metropolitan, quite different in their roles, their destinations – even their passengers. 

Kit had said something, but Will is pretty sure he never responded. Flapped a hand, turned away, and came north of the river to his space. He could call home, and the tug of longing is intense. But the lure of the computer is greater. He switches it on, grabs a sandwich while it boots – past experience has taught him to eat before writing, or it doesn't happen. When the blank page appears, the blinking cursor is inviting him. So much to explore.

_Imagine,_ he writes, _That the London Underground is so old that the lines have taken on personality. Imagine, the red and the black, the navy and the silver. Imagine their lives._

It may make a play. Or a short story. Or a limerick to tell at the end of the Development Schools, make people laugh and return to Warwickshire knowing he tried and failed. But at least he will have tried. And he will have done it all through his own effort, his own hand and brain. Without punching anyone, or falling off a high building, or getting crabs. 

His fingers fly over the keys. He'll call Anne tomorrow. See Kit… sometime. Sometime when he has time, and when he has this one down. When he can watch another road untaken, disappearing into the London night, and feel no regrets. 

_The lines that split and branch, diverge and cross. How do they interact? Do they speak? Do they quarrel? Is there envy under the ground? Is there ambition? Does Jubilee yearn for her future growth, striking out East? Metropolitan and Hammersmith mourn their Siamese separation?_

When he looks up, it will be dawn. Some day's dawn.


End file.
